Inside The Hunt For Osama

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The raids never uncovered a list of operatives in the cell but did rattle many of the members. One typed on el Hage's computer a "security report" to a senior bin Laden aide complaining that "the cell is at 100% danger" because of hostile intelligence agencies. FBI agents believe the report's author was Abdullah Mohammed Fazul, whom the CIA at the time had identified only as a distant associate of el Hage's. He was later accused of being a key planner of the embassy bombings the next year. El Hage moved with his family to Texas, where he lived and worked as a tire repairman until he was charged this fall with conspiracy in the Africa bombings.

Meanwhile, the CIA station conducted another covert operation in Kenya. It was prompted by a tipster who walked into the Nairobi embassy in September 1997 and claimed that seven Arabs who worked for a local Islamic charity had connections with a bin Laden terror group. The agency confirmed that there were indirect ties, so Kenyan authorities deported the men to their home countries, and CIA officers began sifting through all the documents left behind.

State Department officials now question whether the CIA missed clues to a future attack in those papers. Intelligence officials insist that none of the evidence taken revealed a bombing plot. Bin Laden definitely had a cell in Nairobi, the CIA reported to the embassy at the time, but the agency had no idea what he planned to do with it. Bin Laden had made plenty of public threats against the U.S., but the CIA believed he would be most likely to carry them out in Persian Gulf countries, where there was a U.S. military presence he hated, not in East Africa.

Two months later, in November 1997, another informant walked into the Nairobi embassy. He was Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, an Egyptian, who warned that unnamed terrorists planned to car bomb the compound. Ahmed had details about the planned attack--details that would end up being eerily similar to what happened in the bombing nine months later. (He is under arrest in Dar es Salaam, accused in the Tanzania embassy blast.)

CIA officers grilled Ahmed for days but finally concluded he was making up the tale. If an informant is credible, the agency often dispatches a special countersurveillance unit, nicknamed the snapshot team, which will sit in the embassy, wearing night-vision goggles from dusk to dawn, and peer out windows to spot terrorists casing the building. No snapshot team was dispatched to Nairobi. Instead, the station sent out another warning report: Ahmed is probably fabricating the story, but he could be telling the truth, or he could be approaching the embassy to check its security.

It was the kind of report embassy security officers detest. A warning that tells you everything and nothing. Nevertheless, extra guards were posted at the front and back of the building, and nervous security officers convinced their ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, to fire off a letter to Albright warning that the embassy was vulnerable to car bombs. But Nairobi's remained low on the priority list of embassies due for major security upgrades.